


Up/Down

by fullyajar



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e12 Alethia, F/F, Mild Blood, Mild Language, Missing Scene, Rescue Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-18
Updated: 2015-01-18
Packaged: 2018-03-08 00:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullyajar/pseuds/fullyajar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At least seven floors to scale and clear with probably about a dozen agents between her and the package - but perhaps said package can be of some use, she thinks with a cocky smile.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>Time for a hammer, time for a scalpel, and all that other Harold wisdom. And if she’s the hammer, Root would <b>definitely</b> be the scalpel. </i>
</p><p>Set during episode 3x12: Alethia. After Root's capture by Control, Shaw goes to find her, but gets more than she bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up/Down

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm just catching up to Person of Interest and I got to 3x12 before the urge to write for RootxShaw hit, and I just couldn't resist. I'm new to the characters, but hopefully I'll be writing for POI more often.

Harold barely bats an eyelid when she emerges from the bathroom already packing heat before even pulling on a shirt, and simply nods toward his computer station before turning back to Claypool with hunched, resigned shoulders. She fingers the fried ankle-bracelet with an impressed huff.

What’d they expect, honestly?

She glances at the stash of guns in her duffel bag and scoffs again.

Of course Root would take _her_ favorite .45mm’s.

Her frown is only half-irritated, because really, she doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it was precisely those guns in Root’s semi-capable if somewhat sloppy hands that saved her, Harold’s, and Arthur the Forgetful’s ass only a few hours before.

Seems she’s got a debt to pay.

Bear nudges at her hand, sniffs the bracelet, and whines.

“Don’t worry, buddy, I’ll find her.”

Harold limps to her shoulder. “I don’t know how you expect to do that, Miss Shaw. We both know how effective Miss Groves is at evasion when she doesn’t want to be found.”

She smiles confidently. “Who says she doesn’t?”

Harold raises a curious eyebrow.

“We’re her contingency plan. Whether she knows it or not.”

“But how will you find her?”

She drops her phone on the desk. “I clone, you trace.”

The name _Diane Claypool_ shines up from the screen – highly convenient, if completely inaccurate – and Harold’s eyes widen.

“Well done, Miss Shaw.”

She smirks and shrugs on her jacket. 

 

* * *

 

The building screams corporate vacancy and bankrupt abandonment, but Shaw isn’t so easily fooled, and the butt of her Colt assault rifle is steady and unyielding against her shoulder. She slips in a service entrance and freezes when she door shuts silently behind her, breathing steady and listening.

A restless (careless) shuffle of feet around the corner.

A bored cough a few feet on.

The repeated click of someone playing with a safety.

She smirks. Idiots.

Two guards to the east. She listens again. Maybe three. The closed elevator doors are straight ahead, perpendicular to the guard-infested hallway, and the door to the stairwell close by. At least seven floors to scale and clear with probably about a dozen agents between her and the package – but perhaps said package can be of some use, she thinks with a cocky smile.

Time for a hammer, time for a scalpel, and all that other Harold wisdom. And if she’s the hammer, Root would _definitely_ be the scalpel.

She crouches down and lowers her weapon, listening intently at the corner.

Deep breath. Feel it. Time it.

She dashes across the hallway and slides to her knees, nearly soundless save for the clack of her handgun holster against her thigh.

 “Did you hear something?”

She holds her breath.

“Darryl playing with his gun, as usual,” a deep voice rumbles with a laugh.

“Fuck you, no I wasn’t.”

“Don’t hurt yourself with that, big boy.”

The laugh carries through the hallway, but the area stays free of approaching footsteps.

She slides back against the door to the stairwell and slips inside.

There are two agents on each floor guarding the elevator doors. She sees them through the thin window in the doors. They never see her. As she likes it.

She pushes open the door to the seventh floor and crawls forward with muffled footsteps that just break the quiet. The silence is deafening, and utterly out of place. She glances around skittishly. Something’s up. Amiss. She hasn’t decided in whose favor it is.

She stalks down the brightly lit hallway to the open, barely lit space rimmed by windows. The guards are sprawled around the interrogation pen like the blast radius of a grenade. It doesn’t take a genius to know who the epicenter was. Root’s destructive nature spares no victims.

She slings the rifle over her shoulder and approaches the pen cautiously.

‘Diane’ – Control – is slouched forward in a hard-backed chair across from another – the interrogation chair, it’s plain to see. There’s a small puddle of blood to the right of it, and the metal shines with dried sweat that still hangs in the air with acrid bitterness. Her stomach clenches with rage.

She nudges Control. Out cold. Blood still wet across her brow.

The syringes tinged with blood shine on the table, and the sweat-stained fingerprints on the armrests of the interrogation chair are plain to see. She’s sustained torture by her ex-bosses before. And it’s no picknick.

Her jaw tightens.

Damnit, Root.

She slams the grip of her gun against Control’s other brow.

Just in case, she tells herself.

There’s a sound behind her, and she whips around smoothly with the rifle pressed to her shoulder again. A door is creaked slightly ajar back the way she came, sending a sliver of light across the floor. She pushes it open abruptly, and takes aim as the room comes into view.

Root looks up sharply, eyes wide and skittish, before her face breaks into a smile and the tension in her body resolves in a sigh of relief.

“My savior.”

She glances around the bathroom, taking in the splatter of blood in the sink and the handgun on the counter. “Root.”

Root’s smile widens when Shaw takes a cautious step closer, sweeping the room as she’s trained.

“You know, we have to stop meeting like this,” Root purrs.

Shaw kicks the door closed, and they’re completely alone. “Like what?”

Root tilts her head pointedly. “With me staring down the barrel of your gun.”

She lowers it. Reluctantly.

“You okay?”

She smiles ruefully. “I’ve been better.”

She takes her in: sweat-stained shirt hanging loose over her haggard frame, a tremor in her blood-stained hand, and an exhausted kind of restlessness in her gaze that she hasn’t seen there before. It’s unsettling, and she frowns. “You’ve _looked_ better.”

The wild look is replaced by a flirtatious smile. “And you’ve noticed, have you?”

She rolls her eyes. There’s the Root she knows. She slings her rifle to her back. “What’s the damage?”

“You tell me, doctor.” She removes the towel pressed against her upper arm and grimaces as the bleeding starts up again.

Her reaction is perfunctory, instant. Something she can fix is broken, and she presses her fingers around the wound, feeling a steady pulse and a hard nodule halfway through Root’s arm.

“It missed your brachial artery, but the bullet’s still inside. I’ll need to dig it out.”

Root reaches to her hair and sends the sweat-drenched tendrils falling around her shoulders. “I’ve got a hairclip?”

She smirks and unclips her field suture kit from her belt. “I’ve got better.”

Root smiles with wide, playful eyes and shakes her hair from her face.

She disinfects the wound and purses her lips in surprise when Root barely flinches. A tendril of hair sweeps across the wound and she moves it behind Root’s ear in irritation.

“Keep your hair off the sterile field, would you?” she spits, and Root ties her hair back up dutifully.

“You come prepared,” Root points out as she sterilizes her tools. “Were you worried I might be hurt?”

“Worried I might have to clean up my own damage,” she throws back, and sets to work, hand tight around Root’s upper arm to pull the wound open (and cut off any words with simple pain), and tweezers held delicately in her fingers. Root looks on patiently, her pained grimaces alternating with a mysterious, curious smile that only grows wider as she takes in her diligent handiwork. Shaw frowns. The silence stretches with Root’s smile, both creeping under her skin in a way that feels decidedly more uncomfortable than the way she’s literally prodding below Root’s.

“You take out those agents?” she asks finally, snapping Root out of her unsettling studious gaze.

Root’s eyes glaze and her smile turns adoring. “No, _she_ did.”

“Mmm.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“Well-spotted.”

Root tilts her head fondly. “It isn’t hard to remotely overload a transceiver charge and turn it into a home-made and highly-effective taser.”

“Seems the Machine shares your fondness for tasing,” she retorts with a vicious twist of the tweezers.

Root flinches and eyes her incredulously. “ _Ow_.”

The bullet drops in the sink with a high-pitched clatter.

“There. Stitches will have to wait ‘til we get to the safehouse.”

“My prison, you mean.”

She tenses, and her hand creeps to the grip of her rifle.

Root huffs in irritation. “Oh, relax. I’ll go quietly, as they say, but don’t pretend it’s anything but that.”

“You made your bed,” she points out as she slings her rifle off her shoulder and turns to the door.

“At least you’ll be around to warm it for me.”

That, she ignores. She nods at the handgun on the counter. “That thing loaded?”

“I think so. Why?”

“We’re kind of outnumbered here.”

Root frowns curiously but reaches for the gun nonetheless. “I’d hoped you’d cleared the way for me.” Her voice drops in disappointment. “For us.”

She scoffs and tightens her grip on the rifle. “Always a chance it would have been just me, so no.”

Root laughs. “This was a rescue mission, never a hit. You’re not going to shoot me again.”

She smirks and shifts her weight, hefting her rifle pointedly. “Don’t rule it out just yet.”

Root wraps a bandage around her arm, pulling tight and staunching the bleeding. “Well, I trust _you_.”

She scoffs and shakes her head. “Now I _really_ feel like shooting you.”

Root straightens, unfazed, and hops off the sink. “Well, then I trust _her_ for not blocking Harold’s trace _._ There are no cameras here.You’re my only way out of here.”

Shaw tries to hide the smirk that’s pressing at her lips, and Root tilts her head curiously. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

The smirk escapes and she tilts her head cockily. “I had a hunch.”

“My hero,” Root says with a playful smile, and cocks the handgun.

For once, Shaw doesn’t feel the need to eye the loaded gun with trepidation, and shoves open the bathroom door, Root hot on her heels.

The metallic elevator doors loom at the end of the silent hallway. She’s cleared this floor, but she knows there are plenty of agents waiting below. It won’t be hard to get them all running up the stairwell and take them out from higher ground, but she and Root are the ones at the end of the road – behind them, above them, no escape to higher floors. It’s less than ideal.

She eyes the elevators, and smirks when an idea hits her.

“This way,” she demands, and Root follows without a word.

The elevator opens with a ding that rings too loud for comfort, but it can’t be helped, and she quickly ushers them inside, pressing the button for the floor below.

“There are two guards on each floor until the bottom floor. I’ll take the one of the left if you take the one on the right.” She shifts her rifle into her grip and grits her teeth, preparing as the doors slide shut.

Root’s hands shake on the handgun. “My aim might be a bit off,” she murmurs with an apologetic grimace.

Shaw side-eyes her meaningfully.

“More off than usual,” Root concedes with a smile. “I got injected with a pretty potent cocktail of uppers and downers that even college didn’t prepare me for.”

A chime rings, and she raises the rifle. “ _Great_.”

The doors slide open to reveal two very confused agents with their backs to the elevators who turn and reach for their guns – too slow. Shaw squeezes off a round into her target’s knee, and he slouches to the ground with a groan. The other manages to raise his gun, shoots, misses, and she’s about to return fire when his neck explodes in blood and he gurgles a scream that makes even _her_ grimace.

The elevator doors slide shut with a comical chime, and Root lowers her gun, face slack with shock.

“Oops.” She tries to hide her chuckle, and Shaw huffs in disbelief as she takes her gun and stashes it in an extra holster.

“You’re in charge of the buttons now.”

Root ducks her head with a smile and presses the next floor dutifully.

They make their way downward slowly. The agents are prepared by the gunfire above, but still no match, and they crash to the ground with shattered kneecaps or, if they manage to reach for their gun, clutching limp shoulders, and by the time they’ve recovered enough to raise their weapons, the doors of the elevator close and the titanium catches their shots more effectively than any kevlar.

On the third floor, Root presses the next button and hops on the tip of her toes happily. “This is fun. We should definitely do this more often.”

Shaw eyes her incredulously, taking in her wide, excited eyes and wicked smile in disbelief. “You’re high.”

Root just hums and bobs her head to a song only she can hear. “What soberness conceals, drunkenness reveals.”

The doors open, and gunfire sends Root ducking against the side of the elevator while Shaw takes aim against five agents – two at their stations, three from the ground floor. Their gunfire sprays around her, and her stomach drops in dread. She takes one out, ducks back against the side of the elevator, and checks the magazine. The elevator doors close, and an agent slips into the edge of her vision to open them again. She shoots him in the shoulder as the doors open, and he’s dragged from sight.

Two down, three to go.

The back wall of the elevator continues to explode with a deafening volley of gunshots, and Root cowers by the control panel, cradling her ear. A bullet ricochets off the wall and lodges in the carpeted floor, millimeters from Root’s foot.

She steels her jaw. When there’s a lull in the gunfire, steps out and fires off three quick rounds that do a little more than just incapacitate her targets. It’s back to the old days – what she’s good at – and what Harold doesn’t know won’t hurt him. 

Silence falls, and she stands frozen in place as Root slowly straightens. The doors close, and the woman silently presses the last button.

“Is that all of them?” she asks like she’s in a daze.

She hefts her rifle and checks the magazine with a satisfied nod. Efficient shooting. “Yes. Car’s outside.”

“You know, I think I might actually miss you.” Root’s voice is distant, regretful, and she frowns.

“What?”

She tightens her grip and turns – to just see the glint of a syringe as Root plunges it into her neck. She gasps and slams up her elbow, but Root ducks the attack and slides a hand to her back as her knees give out from under her, softening her descent as she staggers to the ground.

“That would be one of the downers you’re feeling,” Root says sweetly – like Shaw needs the explanation as she gasps against the quick effects and slides into Root’s cradling embrace like a sleepy child. “I considered giving you an upper instead, just for kicks, but it wouldn’t have quite gotten the job done…”

Her face falls forward against Root’s shoulder and her stomach clenches in irritation that she _just_ misses the wrapped up bullet wound with her forehead.

“Bitch…” she murmurs through buzzing lips.

Root chuckles, lays her gently on the carpet of the elevator, and steals her gun and suture kit. “I’m awfully sorry about this, you know. But in a choice between her and you – it’s going to be her.” She tilts her head fondly and moves a lock of her hair away from where it’s obscuring her vision – the sight of Root looming over her, eyebrows pulled together in dubious concern and infuriating curiosity. Her hands shake with sleep as she reaches for her rifle.

“Maybe next time, I can save _you_ instead,” Root says with a sickeningly sweet smile, and then steps over her shuddering body and stalks down the empty hallway, dropping Control’s phone and crushing it with her heel as she goes.

Shaw clenches her jaw and presses a shaking finger to her earpiece as her eyelids flutter. “Harold – ”

His answer is instant. “Yes, Miss Shaw?”

“Root drugged me. I’m going to need extraction,” she grits out, clutching at her gun and consciousness, but feeling both slip out slowly from her grip as Root makes her way confidently down the hall.

A beat of radio silence. Then: “We’re going to have to work on the way you and Miss Groves relate to each other.”

 “Save me the lecture for when I’m not about to lose consciousness.” She severs the connection and struggles up to her elbows with the rifle loose and lazy in her hands. She peers down the barrel, Root right in sight.

She could shoot. Kneecap, shoulder. Her vision blurs and the muzzle veers left.

She might miss. Her fingers tighten on the trigger nonetheless and she takes aim.

Or it might be lethal.

Her finger loosens slowly.

Damn drugs, she thinks silently, and ignores the fact that her hand is steady on the rear grip and it’s just her finger that seems to be failing.

Root turns back at the front entrance just as her vision is seriously starting to blur. She smiles slowly, mysteriously, and winks at her. Then the elevator doors close silently, and she’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought! Comments are eternally appreciated.


End file.
